The Diplomat
The European Commission confirmed yesterday the transfer of the €10 billion corresponding to the first tranche of the recovery fund, making Spain the first country to receive direct funding from the Recovery Plan. Transformation and Resilience Plan (PRTR).
This transfer by the European Central Bank concludes the disbursement request procedure formally initiated on November 11 by the General Secretariat of European Funds, which reports to the Ministry of Finance and Public Administration.
This first tranche of Community resources is linked to the fulfillment of 52 milestones of the Plan, which mainly cover reforms in areas such as sustainable mobility, energy efficiency, decarbonization, connectivity, modernization of the Public Administration or R&D (research and development). In the Spanish case, according to the Government, specific projects such as the Digitalization Plan for SMEs 2021-2025, equal pay for women and men or the Climate Change and Energy Transition Law stand out.
The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has congratulated Spain through social networks and highlighted that it is the first country to receive a payment from the Next Generation EU fund, which has been possible after the favorable assessment of the Commission and the Council. Von der Leyen herself delivered last June in Madrid to the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, the EU Executive’s approval of the Spanish Government’s Recovery Plan to overcome the crisis caused by the pandemic.
Spain was also the first country to submit the first request for disbursement, which took place in mid-November following the signing and entry into force of the Recovery Plan’s Operational Arrangements (OA), which establish the technical aspects for monitoring the development of the Recovery Plan bilaterally between Spain and the European Commission. The Spanish Government was precisely the first EU Member State to sign this agreement, which must be signed by the 27 European Union countries participating in the European Recovery and Resilience Mechanism (ERM).
The receipt of the 10 billion euros corresponding to the first disbursement will be added to the 9.036 billion euros that Spain received last August as pre-financing, a figure equivalent to 13% of the 69.5 billion euros that the country will receive in the form of grants from the RRM. This year, therefore, more than 19,000 million euros linked to the Recovery Plan will have been received through transfers from the European Commission to Spain.
